The Art of Being Neighborly

Most Americans experience the frustration of an uncleared sidewalk during the winter: trudging through knee-deep snow, wet and cold, we always wonder which neighbor didn’t do their duty—who didn’t clear their patch of sidewalk? According to CityLab reporter Lydia Lee, one community in Ann Arbor, Michigan has fixed this problem—by pooling their money, buying a tractor named “SnowBuddy,” and organizing a volunteer force to man the snowplow:

It took only a couple of weeks to raise the $18,000 in startup funds that the board of the SnowBuddy (now registered as a formal nonprofit) had set as their first goal. … This winter, the SnowBuddy tractor has already made its 8-hour circuit around the neighborhood’s sidewalks about 10 times. In addition to 12 volunteer tractor drivers, others have signed up for the “windrow patrol”: They shovel away the piles of ice and snow pushed up by road snowplows that block the ends of sidewalks at intersections.

This story brought me back to almost an exact year ago, when a snow storm bellowed through D.C. and Northern Virginia, leaving driveways and sidewalks caked with snow. My husband was gone, and I was about to leave on a 9-hour road trip.

But when I walked out to my car, I found it buried in thick snow on every side. Young apartment-living individual that I was, I had no snow shovel. So I began kicking and clawing and wrestling with the snow. As you can imagine, this method wasn’t very useful. Just as I was getting very tired and wet, a stranger came over, and shoveled my car to freedom. He beckoned for me to get in the car, start it, and make sure I could pull out. Just as I pulled out onto the road—free at last—with a smile and a wave, the stranger was gone. I didn’t even have time to get out and say thank you.

This stranger had mastered the art of neighborliness: the art of anonymous friendship, offered without expectation of return. And that kind, mysterious individual has remained with me ever since—a reminder of the anonymous affection that we so often can offer, but choose not to. We usually have a plethora of excuses: lack of time or resources, a frantic schedule and needy kids, thousands of weighty concerns already burdening our minds.

There is something else, too, that often prevents us from reaching out: fear. It’s a simple yet potent ingredient that can poison all our interactions. It’s the sort of thing that infects many American towns. It prevents parents from letting their kids accept homemade treats (or even wrapped candy) on Halloween. It’s the sort of thing that results in us calling the cops, rather than reaching out and helping our neighbor. As a country, we are slowly un-learning the art of neighborliness.

But stories like Lee’s are a welcome reminder that, in truth, community rapport and neighborliness are still alive—in different places, and in different ways. Preventing the decline of neighborliness is not only possible: it is already happening in many neighborhoods, as people realize what they’ve lost.

We are a society obsessed with work, a society in which most gathering and fellowship now happens outside the home, at restaurants or bars or coffee shops. We’ve moved the crux of hospitality and fellowship away from the home and neighborhood, thus creating an empty vacuum in our local affections. We’ve spread our commutes further and further from our locales, making it increasingly difficult to spend time at home. Our churches are often a half hour, or an hour, away from our homes. We’ve structured lives in which the home and neighborhood are always secondary.

This often leads to a second dilemma: our society has become frightened and wary of the stranger, always assuming the worst. And while this is indeed necessary at times—especially, say, for a young woman traveling alone, or a child at the park—such fear also prevents us from offering, or from accepting, the friendship of a stranger. We become accustomed to viewing everyone around us with a wary eye, from metro riders to the local coffee barista. This wariness and fear is a major impediment to neighborliness: how can we love the people around us if we’re constantly expecting them to knock on our front door with an ax in tow? Perhaps we watch too many horror movies; perhaps we have let rational fear morph into irrational terror. But regardless, such hostilities are absolutely antithetical to hospitality.

The local community often is not the fearsome place we think it is—or at least, if we started investing in it, it could be that even the darkest of neighborhoods would begin to change. But such investment requires a subjugation of our desires and schedule to serve our neighbors. As the aforementioned story and the CityLab article point out, the work of neighborliness is often thankless or unpaid work. It may often be offered to someone you may never see again. Thus, it requires a purposeful sacrifice of the self, as well as a trust that the resources, time, and love offered will not return void—but that, rather, it is indeed “more blessed to give than to receive.”

Interestingly, the SnowBuddy organizer, Paul Tinkerhess, thinks that the job of clearing sidewalks should eventually be handed back to the city:

While gratified by the community response, Tinkerhess would ultimately like to see the city take on the job of clearing sidewalks. “We want to make an example of what a neighborhood looks like through the winter if its walks are all kept clear,” he says. “But equally important, we want to encourage our city officials to consider taking this task from us, since they are the rightful administrators of the transportation corridors.”

But what Tinkerhess and the SnowBuddy are encouraging in their endeavor is something that a city-organized clearing system could never replace: a network of community, a vibrant “little platoon,” characterized by a true understanding of what it means to be neighborly.

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4 Responses to The Art of Being Neighborly

The first denizens to move into the apartment complexes where I now live were upwardly mobile for the most part seeing apartment living as a stepping stone towards acquiring private homes. But many remained making it their permanent abode. While homeowners surrounding this complex derisively called it the projects, we undertook the formation of a community council that looked after the neighborhood and also ran a local newspaper funded by advertisers. There were also social clubs. It was likened to a small town except for the dearth of stores. You had to walk a few blocks to shop. Years passed and a local congresswomen sent an open letter of apology to us stating how we had been a boon to the local economy shopping at the stores along the avenues nearby; the fear of barbarians at the gate had gradually abated through the years.

Today, all of this is gone. The denizens who first moved here have disappeared for the most part many leaving this mortal coil and the children have long since gone away. There is no newspaper and no community council. And the few surviving social clubs barely hang on. The membership of the local synagogue is almost all gone although still open on Saturdays and must draw volunteers from the religious neighborhood way down the avenue to make the quorum of ten males.

There are many new faces speaking a melange of languages. Some are possibly building their own networks but through their churches. This although is not apparent to me who has become an outsider. Others develop informal bonds with neighbors especially those that speak their languages. This is the way neighborhoods change in densely populated metropolitan areas. It would be the social evolution of a place had the social supports merely been replaced by a new membership retrofitted to fill their needs. But such is not the case. The formal social support networks have long since bit the dust leaving nothing in their place. And now the “we” has disappeared and a disparate collection of people remains. This is another case pointing towards the loss of social capital and thus an example of social devolution not social evolution of a neighborhood.

While “Snow Buddy” is a good idea in terms of providing for a real neighborhood need, it would be so much better if it were a paid job. Ann Arbor is surrounded by communities where people are really struggling to make ends meet–why not employ some of those people? An eight-hour gig behind a sidewalk tractor would provide a healthy boost to unemployment benefits (meaning: the relatively small amount of money earned wouldn’t be penalized) for say, seven people (one each week—maybe more if a second shift is needed). That’s a better “win-win” for neighborliness.

Because well-off people in well-off areas isolating themselves in just-this-side-of gated communities and explicitly not considering the rest of us their “neighbors”—and more importantly, aggressively pursuing political and social policies that externalize costs and problems onto those no-longer-neighbors has created and is compounding the problems of which you speak.

The royal “we” is getting a real workout here. As folks would say in my world, “you got a mouse in your pocket or somethin’?” “We” didn’t outsource jobs. “We” didn’t create the resulting long commutes in outsourcing’s aftermath. “We” didn’t create the conditions whereby housing in economically abandoned areas becomes devalued, while simultaneously increasing the housing cost-to-average-wage in areas where employment is a possibility. “We” didn’t abandon older city neighborhoods. “We” didn’t move all the goods and services to the outskirts of town/suburbia. “We” aren’t the absentee landlords/slumlords. “We” aren’t the ones killing the commons.

We just get to deal with the aftermath.

None of this is a matter of individual choices. It’s a matter of public policy.

It is a complex problem…I think an answer could be in how we build public places.

Places can be built to optimize social interactions. Thus making us more trusting of one another.

In my Midwestern city I bike year round. I often find people stuck on the side of the road in my commutes. No gas, stuck in a snowbank, just had a wreck, etc. stopping and helping takes almost no time. And you are likely to meet someone interesting in the meantime.

It is amazing watching the lines of drivers not offering help to people in need. Maybe they are in a hurry, maybe they are unsure of where to park their vehicle.

We are overburdened. Overburdened by work, excess cars, health problems, and frivolous consumption. How do we free ourselves from these burdens to allow ourselves to be more neighborly, more compassionate?